Monday, 15 May 2017

Surgical Strike Shopping

I have a confession to make. I’m a reluctant shopper. I know
this is very unpatriotic since 70% of US GDP comes from us spending money on ourselves
or each other. My reluctance has nothing to do with cheapness, I hasten to add,
for I vigorously compensate in various saloons and hostelries around the
country.

Christmas is a time of trial for me. I begin to get nervous
around Thanksgiving and the first onslaught of carols. But I have the perfect
antidote for the following month-long orgy of consumerism. I become a
surgical-strike shopper!

However, I do procrastinate until Christmas Eve, and this
has led to panic-filled moments of elbowing one’s way through crowded stores,
while imploring surly employees to descend into basements to locate a
particular size or color.

All changed, utterly changed. Last December 24th such was
the paucity of shoppers I could have demanded that I be carried like a pasha
through the deserted racks; and talk about the smiles I received, surliness is
indeed a thing of the past in retail. Not to mention that everything had been
marked down 20-40%.

I was home within hours - gifts wrapped and hidden under the
bed - confident that I had aided President Obama boost his paltry 2% annual
growth, soon to be measured against President-Elect Trump’s promised gargantuan
4%.

Unfortunately, two of the three stores I visited on
Christmas Eve have closed, while the staff looked particularly glum in the
empty third the last time I sauntered by.

Nor is this retail cataclysm limited to my neck of the
woods. Malls are in trouble everywhere, American Apparel is closing down, JC
Penney and the mighty Sears are scaling back and may not survive the full
frontal assault of online shopping.

There is no doubt that many jobs in warehousing and
transportation have been created by the mighty Amazon and other online retailers.
But what happens to cities if you take away the great downtown flagship stores?

Will they be replaced by mom and pop stores, as one might hope?
No way, Jose! If the big chains cannot do battle with online retailers, who
can?

Amazon is finally turning a profit. Hurray, but Twitter,
Uber and so many other online behemoths are not. The common online formula seems
to be – drive competitors out of business by slashing prices, survive on Wall
Street investment, and eventually take the company public and make a killing.

Spotify’s annual revenue crests 2 billion dollars and yet it
still has not turned a dime in profit. But it has obliterated the livelihood of
a generation of musicians and destroyed their entrepreneurial dream of someday
making back the money they’ve invested in recording an album. That dream still
exists for the vaunted .001% of megastars; but for your meat and potatoes
musician – fuggedaboutit!

It’s the same disturbing trend that we see in life in
general – the world belongs to the super-rich, with an ever-dwindling share of
profits accruing to everyone else!

Candidate Trump used to trumpet a cruel world where $25 per
hour miners and manufacturing employees were being swindled of their jobs by crafty
foreign governments, elite liberals, and criminal Mexicans. These dispossessed
workers were being forced to downgrade to service jobs in the $8-12 per hour
range.

However, what happens if many of these service jobs are also
disappearing. And don’t tell me that warehouse workers won’t soon be replaced
by robots that don’t even need a lunch break, let alone a couple of hours of
anxious sleep.

If there’s a solution it will come in the form of education
and skill attainment. After all, someone’s going to have to oil the bloody
robots and keep them from rusting.

Education costs money, however, and such expenditure is
hardly on the books in President Trump’s New Deal. Ah yes, we’re back to good
old-time voodoo economics – cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy and
eventually the bucks will trickle down to the rest of us peons.

Oh dear, I’m already fretting about Christmas. Excuse me
while I click on Amazon – I’m sure they’ve already got some good December deals
on tap. No more surgical strike shopping for me!

No comments:

Post a Comment

We welcome short comments on Belfast Media Group blog postings but you should be aware that, since we've put our names to our articles, we encourage you to do so also. Preference in publication will be given to those who provide an authenticated full name — as is already the case in our newspapers. Comments should be short and relate to the subject matter and, of course, shouldn't be libelous. And remember, if you find that there isn't enough space on our blogs for your views, you can always start your own. There are over two million blogs out there, another one can only benefit the blogosphere.